Underground Airlines (41 page)

He screamed while Martha turned the bottle deeper, and I lurched my body forward, overturning the table into Cook, knocking him against the wall and banging his head hard into it, sending a small burst of plaster out onto the both of us.

“God
damn
it,” he said and reached for his gun where it had skittered on the tabletop, but I put my hands on top of his hands on top of the weapon, and we were struggling for it when over my shoulder I heard Martha shouting, “Shit! Asshole!” I jerked up, hard, bringing all four of our hands up off the table, Cook clutching the pistol and me clutching his fingers, both of us yelling. Morris was holding his wounded guts with one hand, but the other hand held his automatic, and he was trying to get a bead on Martha, who had just rolled behind the bed.

I wrenched Cook’s finger, and the shot was an explosion in the small room. Morris fell but got off one shot at me as he was falling. I did not feel the bullet—didn’t feel it because it had caught not me but Cook, and a geyser of blood erupted from the center of his throat, and his eyes went wide and white, wide like Castle’s eyes. His eyes in the darkness. Pleading eyes, wide in the rain. Castle wanted to go back and help Reedy, and I said no we couldn’t go back, and I was scared, too, but there would be no more chances, not like this one. Reedy was dying and the rain was pounding and that fence post was loose, I had seen it come loose, and this was the only opportunity we were going to get, the only one we would ever get. I told Castle what he’d told me, so many times he’d told me, that we were different, that there was more for us, but he said not if we died! Not if we got caught running and they put us down or sold us offshore! And he was scared, I understood that, goddamn it, I was scared, too, but standing out there in the rain arguing made no sense, we had to go, we had to fucking
go
. I grabbed him by the neck and told him we were going and he said no again, fighting and pushing back at me, and I squeezed his throat and his eyes went wide and wider till he stopped fighting and then I ran, I ran away alone. Rain washed the blood from me while I was running, and everything I’ve gotten since I have deserved.

“He’s dead,” Martha was saying. Yelling. “Victor! Brother! He’s dead. It’s too late.”

Cook was under me. We were on the ground. I had my hands on his neck, trying to hold back the blood, push it back in. I was trying to heal the man, but his eyes were open, staring, white.

Very slowly I let him go. There was blood all over me, blood on my hands and up my arms and on my naked chest. I stood up. The room was full of red.

“Okay,” Martha was saying. She was trembling. I was trembling, too. “Okay. Okay. Okay.”

2.

The steps
of the monument were gray and slick with rain.

I stood beneath the Martyr with my hands in my pockets. I didn’t smoke. I didn’t tilt my head up to feel the drizzle on my cheeks. I didn’t move. I stood beneath Old Abraham, quietly fiddling with the green bracelet I was still wearing on my arm. Doing nothing but waiting.

The streets were empty, more or less. Laughing voices, now and then, carried over from Georgia Street, the blocks of bars a quarter mile or so away. I saw a couple leaning into each other, climbing unsteadily into the back of a cab, way down on Market Street.

But the ring of shops and office buildings that wreathed Monument Circle were all closed this late at night. Here in the bull’s-eye of the city, at this hour of night, it was just me out here, just me and the likeness of Lincoln. Both of us likenesses.

And just what was Victor feeling, anyway, as he stood there waiting? What about Old Victor—what was going on inside his mind?

I don’t know. I was drained of emotion, washed out by the rain. I suppose there’s a version of this story in which I’m standing there crackling with joy. Maybe I should have been crying, tears carving rivulets in my stone cheeks. Monumental. There might even have been, in some other reality, knives of regret scything away at my insides.

But none of that, not for me. Just standing, just waiting, coat shrugged close around me, my hands jammed in the pockets of my coat.

In one pocket was the gun, a loose heaviness in the pocket’s depth.

In the other pocket, my right hand was clasped on one corner of the envelope, folding and unfolding one ragged corner.

Up in the sky was the dim, grubby outline of the moon. Abraham Lincoln’s giant disapproving features in shadow above me, staring at the city, the country, all this unfinished business.

“Victor?”

“Yeah. Come on up.”

There was Mr. Bridge, coming carefully up the steps, one step at a time, not wanting to slip, and despite myself I felt the tiniest prickle of disappointment. There must have been some part of me hoping for a surprise. What if Deputy United States Marshal Bridge had turned out to have about him the smoldering air of a secret agent? What if he’d been six foot six and thin as a rail, wearing Loyal Texan cowboy boots and a battered Stetson? What if he wore a yarmulke? What if he were
black?

Alas. Bridge was Bridge. A bushy gray mustache and a sloping forehead below a receding hairline. Tan slacks and brown dress shoes, poorly chosen for rainy late-autumn Indiana. He stood before me, me and my Abraham, a supplicant before the prince and counselor. He was the puffy, dull-eyed middle manager of my most contemptuous imaginings. This, my tormentor.

I raised my hand as I came closer, and he raised his in return. Bridge’s tie was brown and plain.

I fidgeted with the envelope’s dog-eared corner while Bridge came up the steps.

Bridge was alone, per my instructions. I could see down Meridian Street the car from which he’d climbed. He’d emerged from the driver’s seat, and I couldn’t tell if there was someone in the back or not, but it didn’t matter. Here at the steps it was just me and him, Bridge approaching, no bag or case, his hands raised as instructed. I had thought through all these details, got the setup straight: a public place, but a public place wreathed in darkness, a dead downtown in the middle of the night. It was 1:00 in the morning, Sunday morning. Two days since Martha and I returned to the North. Almost two weeks since Kevin was stuffed into the barrel, rolled onto the truck. Eleven days since I checked into the Capital City Crossroads Hotel, just down the hall from Martha and her son.

I ducked my hand into my other pocket, and Bridge stopped abruptly and raised his hands higher. I smiled. A glimmer of feeling reached me, distant but clear: it felt good to be in charge, even of one man, one small moment, one instant.

I wasn’t reaching for my gun. It was the envelope I took out.

Mr. Bridge’s eyes flooded with relief. He was easy to read, easier than ever, now that not even a phone line separated us. He was just here, ten feet in front of me, his features as open and plain as a child’s drawing. He reached out, as though I was just going to hand it over, and I could see it all in his face, the pressure that had been applied on him from wherever it had come.

I dropped the envelope back in my pocket, and he darted out his tongue quickly, licked his lips.

“That’s it?”

“Yes.”

He nodded, licked his lips again. “I must hand it to you, Victor. That was well done. I don’t know how you did it, but that was well done.”

“I’m a professional.”

“Yes.” He nodded:
yes
. “Well, I hope you will not be surprised to hear that I am prepared to live up to my end of the bargain as well. If you would just…”

He took one more step up the stairs, and now my other hand came up, the gun hand. He stopped.

“What is it?” I said. “What’s in there?”

He stopped. “Have you opened it?”

Bridge. Question with a question. I went back on him: “What do you fucking think?” His eyes above the gray mustache were growing fretful. He didn’t like my tone. “Of course I opened it.”

It was still open, as a matter of fact, and it was in my pocket with the open end up. I took it out and held it up in the dim rain-flecked moonlight. A small flask of sturdy plastic or polystyrene, full of clear liquid, secured with a screwed-on cap. Still floating in there, after all this time—after Luna smuggled it out, got it into William Smith’s coat, after Billy panicked and stuffed it in his fridge, after I had it and Morris had it and Cook had it and I had it again—still floating inside that thin flask was something else. Something microscopically small.

“Well?”

Mr. Bridge’s lips were pursed. They disappeared beneath his mustache. “I’m not a scientist.”

“Yeah. Me neither.”

I waited. Bridge could see what the deal was now. I wasn’t turning anything over without this conversation.

“What it is…my understanding is…that what it is is cells.”

“Human cells?”

“Yes and no.”

I aimed my gun at him. “Bridge.”

His face contorted. He didn’t know how to answer. He didn’t know whether he could. Of course I already knew what it was. I had been to Saint Anselm’s. I had found Father Barton, as I expected to, in a wretched state, his man Cook having mysteriously disappeared along with his means of tracking me. I got the drop on Mr. Maris, whispered sweetly to him a little with my weapon in the small of his back, and then me and Father Barton had done some talking. I had done just what I was doing now—held the gun in one hand and this tiny vial in the other, held both before his pale staring eyes, and said to him, this isn’t the financial records of any fucking Malaysian shell company, is it?

At gunpoint he had told me what it was, admitted what he had known all along—that he had sent me down there, run me through all that he had run me through, run Kevin through all that he had run Kevin through, all on the basis of a lie. The truth was too heavy, too serious to be trusted to the poor dumb Negroes he was working so hard to save. Another layer, another layer down.

I had held the damn thing up in front of that monster and threatened to destroy it—burn it before he could show it to anyone. I had flicked my cigarette lighter open beneath the envelope until his soft young face melted with fear.
Please,
he had said.
Please…

And now here was Bridge, the same desperate expression, the same worried
Please
. He rubbed the corner of his mustache.

“They are hybrid cells, Victor. From eggs that are…eggs that have been harvested from human subjects.”

“Slaves.”

He sighed. He looked up toward the statue, as if the Martyr would provide him some relief. I just wanted it. I needed it. I needed for him to say it.

“What is it, Mr. Bridge?” Now I was walking, coming down the steps toward him, gun in one hand, envelope in the other. “You think I’ll back out? You think this is the one thing I can’t live with? After everything I’ve lived with, you think I can’t live with this?”

“Okay,” he said. “Okay. GGSI has a medical facility. Okay? The egg is harvested from a human subject, and—my understanding—the nucleus is removed. And then new material, not new, but taken from other subjects…look, what they’re working on, on making…” He wasn’t a scientist. It sounded insane, but it was true, so he said it. “On making people. It’s hard to understand.”

But I did understand. I understood better than he did. In that black building on the map, auxiliary to the Institute for Agricultural Innovation, they were taking girls like Luna and stealing their eggs, separating out the DNA, forming hybrids, breeding cell lines.

Barton had had his own language for it, had turned it all into biblical horror:
They are casting themselves as God. They are bringing forth the stuff of life.

I put it more plainly still, my gun still trained on Bridge’s wide midsection. “They’re growing slaves.”

“Well,” he said, “they are trying.”

It was coming up, my anger, my disgust, my wild red feeling. It was coming up fast and I knew it was going to and I struggled to keep my voice even. Keep it calm.

“What’ve the marshals got to do with this?”

“Elements within my service,” he began, and from the way he was looking at me, weighing me, I could tell he was trying to find my breaking point. See how much I could take. “Not me, mind. But others—have been involved. In helping to make arrangements to provide some of the necessary technology.”

“Arrangements.”

Bridge nodded. “Again, not me. We are a large organization, Victor, with many layers. But yes. If the population held in bondage, if they were—not technically…people any longer. Certain constitutional issues, certain political issues…would be resolved.”

I tilted the vial one way and then another in my hand, felt the small movement of the liquid. This is what Barton wanted to publicize, this is what the marshals were desperate to have kept secret: not some banking irregularities, not fiscal collusion. This. The next step. They’d been improving the machinery of slavery for two centuries, inventing new tortures to make people work harder and longer. Stripping slaves of their names, their families, their spirits. This is where it went next: people with no bloodline, people with no past and no future, people with no claim to freedom.
These strong hands belong to you…Hands and back and spirit, too…